Wen 丨 Garfield
Edited by 丨 Garfield Kopp
300,000 Burmese pythons invaded the United States, and the official order to hunt and kill them with heavy money had little effect. Why can this group of cold-blooded killers "attack the city" in the United States?
As soon as I heard that the Burmese python was flooding in the United States, many people may have such questions. The Burmese python living in Asia was listed as a vulnerable species tomorrow morning, how did it get to the other side of the ocean and become an invasive species that everyone shouted at?
This goes back to the United States in the 1980s, when exotic pets were popular. The Burmese python, on the other hand, is slender, has dazzling markings, and is extremely easy to keep. In particular, the Burmese python also has some genetic mutations of the "relatives", such as the albino python and the golden python that we all know, these special pets, just set foot on the land on the other side of the ocean, have become the "dream pets" that countless people are enthusiastically pursuing.
According to statistics, in the decade from 1996 to 2006 alone, more than 90,000 Burmese pythons were introduced to the United States. The reason why the Burmese python floods in Florida is because Florida is located in the southeast of the United States, it is bordered by the Gulf of Mexico in the west and the Atlantic Ocean in the east, which is a very ideal trading port, and the Miami International Airport here is also a gateway for goods in and out of South America.
Some unscrupulous merchants, in order to lure more buyers to buy Burmese pythons, will deliberately conceal the breeding habits of Burmese pythons. We all know that the Burmese python, which is known for its huge size, is characterized by its fast growth rate and amazing food intake.
With plenty of food, it only takes a year for them to grow to three meters, which is already the limit for other snakes. But for the Burmese python, this is just the beginning. The Burmese python in adulthood will still continue to grow. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the longest Burmese python is 9.75 meters long.
In addition to its terrifying growth rate, the Burmese python is extremely intelligent. In the wild, they feed on frogs and birds, and they often eat a full meal. But when they become people's pets, they find that as long as they pretend to be hungry, their owners will continue to feed them, knowing this law of Burmese pythons are happy, they will play the game of starvation with their owners from time to time, in order to win the sympathy of their owners, so that the Burmese pythons, which are already growing very fast, are more and more irrepressible.
In the beginning, people could also use animals such as rats and rabbits to feed Burmese pythons. But with the passage of time, these small animals can no longer satisfy their appetites, and the burmese pythons in adulthood often need whole pigs and sheep to fill their stomachs.
Many people think that having a pet is just a pastime in their spare time. Raising pet snakes is more because of novelty and fun, but when the Burmese python grows bigger and bigger, watching themselves gradually can not afford to raise a pet, many people will choose to secretly release the Burmese python.
Not only that, but the extremely aggressive Burmese python is also the reason why people choose to release it. When hunting prey, Burmese pythons often use the strength of their muscles to tightly wrap their prey and take away the life of their prey by strangulation. Their amazing power makes them more and more threatening to humanity.
In Florida, a Burmese python that escaped from a cage and sneaked into a home, strangled a sleeping two-year-old child and swallowed it into his stomach. The tragedy also sounded the alarm for the owners of countless Burmese pythons, so everyone decided to banish the Burmese pythons to the wild.
However, the Burmese python that enters the natural environment is truly the "happy hometown".
The Burmese python that was released into the mountains and forests spread joy on this land. They wantonly encroach on Florida's land and squeeze the living environment of other creatures.
As early as 1992, the living environment of the Burmese python was destroyed by the transit of Hurricane Andrew. The "homeless" Burmese pythons began to migrate to more affitious areas, and in the process of migrating, they came to the Everglades of Florida.
As the largest wildlife park in the United States, the rich resources of the Everglades are simply the ideal home of Burmese pythons, and it is not long before they have a "private life" with the Everglades.
The largest carnivores living in Florida are the alligators, but even these fierce guys are not rivals of the Burmese python. The burmese python, which is four meters long, easily swallows a two-meter-long alligator into its abdomen. There was even a nearly five-meter-long Burmese python caught, and in its bulging belly, three undigested deer were found.
The reason why Burmese pythons are able to swallow prey that is several times larger than themselves is because of their unique jaw structure. Their mandibles can be split in two and are independent of each other and are able to move alternately.
When they catch prey larger than their own, they will stretch their mandibles to the maximum, bite the prey tightly, and then swallow the prey into the abdomen little by little through the alternating movement of the mandible.
And as they devour their prey, the skin and muscles next to their mouths stretch until the end of eating and the tissues return to their place. It is precisely by relying on such a strong eating ability that the Burmese python has gradually become dominant in Florida.
In addition to the threat of no natural enemies, the super reproductive ability is also the reason why burmese pythons can quickly flood.
In general, an adult Burmese python has a lifespan of about twenty years, and female Burmese pythons give birth every other year, and they can lay twenty to fifty eggs each time. This is not the most, a snake catcher once caught a giant python up to five meters long, in its stomach, people found 73 snake eggs. According to statistics, there are about 300,000 Burmese pythons in Florida alone.
Before burmese pythons formed populations, the species in the Everglades were unusually rich. Between 2003 and 2011, a sharp decline in mammal species was observed. According to observational data, during these years, the frequency of observing North American possums has directly decreased by 98%, while the frequency of raccoons has dropped by 99.3%.
Even the rabbits that flooded Australia don't see a trace here. Behind these declining data, every Burmese python with super predatory ability is not innocent. What scares scientists even more is that these Burmese pythons hunt not only mammals, but also birds.
Florida's Everglades were home to many endangered birds, but when the Burmese python arrived, it put the already small number of rare birds in jeopardy. Many times, researchers have found the remains of these rare birds in the digestive tract of Burmese pythons.
Burmese pythons not only hunt other animals, their terrifying eating ability has made it difficult for many predators to hunt, and the number of mountain lions in Florida has dropped sharply due to the inability to hunt normally. According to statistics, in 2013, only 160 wild mountain lions could be observed in Florida.
The Burmese python that wantonly "attacked the city" made the ecological environment in Florida extremely bad, and in order to control the number of Burmese pythons, people had to take certain measures to hunt the Burmese python.
The lack of a threat from predators, coupled with the pleasant natural environment, makes the Burmese python living in Florida grow a few points larger than their brothers in their Southeast Asian homeland. In addition to being beyond the size of pythons, they reproduce very quickly.
To this end, some scholars also said that according to the data of recent years, the Burmese python has begun to encroach on one-third of the inland belt of the United States, and if the Burmese python is allowed to "grow wildly", then the ecological environment of the entire country will be devastated.
As a result, the United States began to encourage people to hunt Burmese pythons. But burmese pythons are so large that it is not easy for ordinary people to hunt them down. To this end, Florida also set up a training class for hunting pythons, personally taught by professionals, after a certain assessment, these professional snake catchers held a certificate and began a hunting career.
In order to motivate the public to hunt pythons, the local "Myanmar Python Challenge" was even held, and for every python caught, the snake catcher received at least fifty dollars in prize money. For those female pythons that have the ability to reproduce, there will be additional bonuses. The python mentioned earlier, which has 73 snake eggs in its body, rewarded the snake catcher with nearly ten thousand dollars. It can be seen how urgent the local government's desire to eliminate pythons is.
However, although since 2017, snake catchers have killed more than 6,000 Burmese pythons. But compared with the burmese python with a large population, the hunting action of the people can only be regarded as a drop in the bucket.
Moreover, the Burmese python, which is extremely good at disguise, also makes people's hunting operations extremely difficult, and even experienced snake catchers are often confused by their disguise.
Seeing that there is no way to control the number of Burmese pythons by hunting alone, local agencies have begun to call on people to eat snakes. As soon as the call came out, the local foodies were very happy, but just as they sharpened their knives at the python, the data released by the environmentalists of the Bureau of Investigation immediately made the high-spirited foodies stop.
Due to its perennial life in the marshlands, the content of toxic metals in burmese pythons is extremely high. Among them, the amount of mercury is even a hundred times higher than the safe dose for humans. In this way, the python will not be able to get out of its mouth.
Until 2010, people saw hope in a cold wave to eliminate pythons. In this cold wave, nearly 90% of the Burmese pythons were frozen to death, and the Burmese pythons that people thought had been wreaking havoc on the mainland for a long time finally attracted the "revenge" of natural disasters. But soon, it was discovered that the Burmese pythons that survived by chance not only adapted to the colder environment, but even passed on hardiness genes to their offspring. It didn't take long for the Burmese python to make a comeback and flood again.
Seeing that they can't kill and eat, even the punishment of nature has been easily dissolved by them, and the people who have been invaded by Burmese pythons have fallen into great troubles, and until now, the invasive species burmese python is still king on the other side of the ocean. People have never found a better way to stop all this.
Through this example, we are actually telling us that when we do not understand the habits of certain organisms, we should not release them at will, sometimes we release one life, but it may harm thousands of lives. Don't let your good intentions evolve into irreparable consequences.